A PANICKED MOTHER traveling by foot from El Salvador to reach the U.S.-Mexico border rubs crushed garlic cloves on her skin to ward off the cottonmouth snakes crawling over her legs. A group of half-starved teenage Vietnamese refugees on a boat they hoped would ferry them to safety huddle together as pirates board and steal all their possessions. At a UN Refugee Office, a father of six and a member of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (a minority ethnic group based in southern Nigeria) whose leadership had been executed by a corrupt Nigerian government, is granted emergency refugee status. The interviewer reaches into her pocket and hands him money to smuggle his family out of Nigeria.